In Hartford, 'Integrated' Schools Remain Highly Segregated

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

TASHNA MORRIS-DALEY of Bloomfield, left, and other parents listen to a pitch by Ken Hurd, assistant principal at the University of Hartford Magnet School in West Hartford during a magnet school fair last November.

TASHNA MORRIS-DALEY of Bloomfield, left, and other parents listen to a pitch by Ken Hurd, assistant principal at the University of Hartford Magnet School in West Hartford during a magnet school fair last November.

In 2015, National Public Radio pointed its microphones at Connecticut, reporting on the unlikely success of Hartford's desegregation efforts. Ira Glass, host of "This American Life," described how other cities had given up on integration or seen their efforts fail. "And then, even more remarkable, in at least one city in Connecticut, it happened," Glass said in his trademark public-radio voice. "In Hartford, they went from 11 percent of their students in integrated schools, to nearly half."

But that's not nearly right.

While supporters have boasted frequently that half of Hartford's children now attend integrated schools, the negotiated settlements in the Sheff v. O'Neill case have allowed the state to count thousands of Hartford students who actually attend segregated — even hypersegregated — schools, a Courant analysis shows. Those students are included through waivers granted to a growing number of schools that fail to meet the desegregation standard, which requires that white and Asian students account for at least 25 percent of the student body.

The settlements also allow the state to include Hartford students who attend segregated suburban schools or participate in interdistrict programs outside their segregated Hartford schools. And, years ago, the parties changed the definition of minority students to make it easier for schools to meet the compliance standard.

Using a stricter definition of integration, the number of Hartford students attending truly integrated schools could be closer to half the figure publicly touted, according to The Courant's analysis.

For the past two years, court settlements have required that 47.5 percent of black and Latino Hartford students receive a "reduced-isolation" education. With that nearly 50-50 figure, supporters of the Sheff desegregation lawsuit frequently use the familiar half-filled glass analogy when describing the status of the suit 20 years after their Supreme Court victory. It is a reflection of both their pride in the multitudes of students who have been helped, and their despair that a majority of Hartford students still attend unconstitutionally segregated neighborhood schools.

"It's sort of the glass half-empty/half-full situation," said Kathleen Frederick, one of the original Sheff plaintiffs. "And it is just about half."

But in reaching even for the 47.5 percent threshold, the court settlements have moved the goal posts repeatedly. The very first stipulated agreement allowed the state to count up to 3 percent of Hartford students as attending integrated schools even though they didn't, as long as the state spent a certain amount of money on cooperative interdistrict programs.

Later agreements have allowed the state to add three percentage points to its compliance figures if a certain number of students participate in interdistrict extracurricular activities, even when their schools are segregated. Elizabeth Horton Sheff, whose son was the lead plaintiff in the suit that bears their name, calls the inclusion of that three percent "garbage."

The agreements also have granted repeated waivers, allowing the state to count students who attend segregated schools if there is an expectation that the schools will become integrated some time in the future — or in one case, even if there is little hope of integration.

Under a waiver granted to the Rawson Lighthouse School in Hartford, 250 city children are counted as receiving a "reduced-isolation" education, even though 97 percent of the students at Rawson are black and Latino. This school year, minority students attending five other magnet schools are counted as attending integrated magnet schools even though their schools missed the 25-percent minimum for white and Asian students by between two and 15 percentage points. Those waivers allow the state to take credit for nearly 700 Hartford students who don't attend integrated schools.

In addition this year, any magnet school that missed the 25-percent minimum for white and Asian students by no more than one percentage point was considered a compliant school if it had a plan to attract more non-minority students. That change allowed the state to include more than 600 students who would not have been counted in any previous year.

Philip Tegeler, one of the original Sheff lawyers, said that schools with no hope of becoming compliant should not be counted. But he defended including those schools that are on a path to integration.

"Schools that are in the process of compliance should be counted. That's absolutely appropriate," Tegeler said. "Schools that are 15- to 20-percent white and half suburban … I think it's reasonable to say for the purposes of the legal definition, those are integrated schools."

Overall, state officials touted in December that they had placed 49 percent of Hartford's black and Latino students in reduced-isolation settings this school year — up from 45.5 percent the year before. "The latest numbers show that more Hartford students than ever before are attending school in diverse settings," State Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell said.

But, in reality, the state lost ground compared to last year, with all of the reported gains coming from new waivers granted to schools that did not meet the Sheff integration standard. Had the state calculated its progress using the same rules in place last year, it would have reported 300 fewer Hartford students in integrated schools.

Winner Take All

In tallying the number of Hartford minority students in integrated schools, the state also counts every Hartford minority student bused to a suburban school through the Open Choice program — even if those students are placed in hyper-segregated white school districts. Nearly half the participating Open Choice schools have student bodies that are more than 85 percent white. And six out of seven Hartford students in the suburbs — about 1,800 last year — attend schools that are at least 75 percent white and Asian.

Tiffany Glanville, a Hartford school board member, bristles at the fact that minority students from Hartford are deemed to be receiving a "reduced-isolation" education when they attend overwhelmingly white schools in the suburbs.

"We don't talk about the racial isolation in Simsbury as being a negative thing the same way we talk about the isolation of Hartford," she said.

But Tegeler strongly defends counting those students. "All of the Open Choice schools are integrated schools. They provide an integrated educational opportunity for the Hartford kids going into them," he said. "You're in a low-poverty school where there's a critical mass of other kids of color. It's small, not enough, but that's definitely an integrated educational opportunity in any desegregation case."

In 2013, lawyers for the Sheff plaintiffs and the state also agreed to change the definition of minority students to include only blacks and Latinos. That meant Asian students and the small number of Native American and Pacific Islander students could be counted along with whites when trying to reach the 25-percent reduced-isolation figure. That instantly turned several schools from non-compliant to compliant and allowed the state to count hundreds of students as attending integrated schools who would not have been counted under the old rules.

Robin Cecere, a state Department of Education lawyer, said the change was not a gimmick to boost the numbers. "Hartford is 95 percent black and Hispanic," she said. And given that concentration, "diversity is more than just bringing white students into the school and sitting next to a white student," she said.

"It always makes me laugh when different people think we changed minority students to white. That's not what happened," she said. "It reflected the idea that bringing students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds into Hartford schools created a diverse environment."

While the change made it easier to declare schools compliant, it also allowed Hartford magnets to enroll more minority students without losing that compliance. Cecere said that's one of the ways the parties have worked during the negotiations to give more opportunities to Hartford students without running afoul of the Sheff suit.

The gravity of the state's effort to boost compliance numbers can be seen in the tumult that followed the belated realization last school year that the state had failed to meet the integration standard required in the court settlement. Although the state initially concluded it had met the mandate that 47.5 percent of minority Hartford children be counted as receiving a reduced-isolation education, the percentage dropped after updated figures showed that one Hartford school included in the calculations — the Dr. James H. Naylor/CCSU Leadership Academy — had fallen out of compliance in the opening weeks of school, by the smallest of margins.

The formula for determining whether the state has met its desegregation goals has a decidedly winner-take-all approach: If a school's student body is at least 25 percent white and Asian, it is deemed to be an integrated school and every one of the Hartford minority students attending can be counted toward the goal. But if a school falls short of that 25 percent without a waiver, the state can count exactly zero students. When Naylor was found to have missed the integration standard by four students, the state lost the ability to count more than 500 Hartford minority students.

That led to a months-long investigation over concerns that some minority students initially had been recorded as white in order to make the school appear compliant with the Sheff mandate. No wrongdoing was found and the discrepancies were chalked up to the variability of self-reporting. But it led to pointed exchanges between lawyers for Hartford and the state over a school's obligation to manage its enrollment for integration purposes. Although Naylor is not a magnet school and its diversity reflects its South End location four blocks from the Wethersfield border, a judge ruled that minority students in the neighborhood school could be counted as part of the Sheff compliance standard. Whether that obliged Hartford to manipulate the school's enrollment was less clear.

In an email to city officials, Peter Haberlandt, director of legal affairs for the state Department of Education, noted the city's position that "Sheff compliance is not a factor" in placing students at Naylor. "I expect we may want to have some follow-up discussion about this," Haberlandt wrote.

Jill Cutler Hodgman, chief labor and legal officer for Hartford schools, sharply wrote back that the city's obligation to pursue integrated schools has its limits. "We cannot seat students or choose to exclude students requesting placement in open seats based on their minority or non-minority status. It is our view that such a process would be illegal," she wrote. "If the State believes that Hartford has an affirmative obligation to make placements or deny students placements within our neighborhood schools based on race/ethnicity, a process that would leave available seats empty and/or favor certain racial/ethnic groups at certain schools, please let us know the legal basis for your position."

The lawyers continued that dialogue outside of email. This school year, Naylor was no longer a topic of discussion, falling well below the threshold to be counted as an integrated school.